{"id":176613,"url":"https://alion.io/job/specter-software-engineer-systems","title":"Software Engineer - Systems","company":{"id":63567,"name":"Specter","domain":"specter.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/specter-com","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":61,"open_postings":34,"ghost_share":0.647,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":151000,"max_usd":318000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":8485},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"FFmpeg","optional":false},{"name":"GStreamer","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"C","optional":true},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-10-03T06:54:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-10-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T13:54:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":378,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":377},"description":"Company Background\n Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.\nToday, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.\nOur co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.\n\nThe Role\n Specter is hiring a Software Systems Engineer to build the real-time device software at the heart of our platform - spanning sensor integration, video pipelines, low-latency networking, and the infrastructure that ties it all together. This role owns the full stack from hardware interface to cloud edge, working closely with ML, perception, and platform teams to ship the performant, reliable systems that power autonomous monitoring across our customers' physical environments.\nResponsibilities:\nDesign and build low-latency networking infrastructure connecting embedded devices and cloud systems - protocol design, congestion handling, and tuning for throughput and reliability across a distributed sensor network\n\nBuild resource-efficient pipelines to ingest and egress multimodal sensor data and telemetry, handling packetization, buffering, and backpressure across constrained device environments\n\nOwn low-latency command and control infrastructure across a distributed sensor network, with a focus on fault tolerance, deterministic timing, and graceful degradation\n\nIntegrate and fuse multimodal data streams from cameras, IMUs, and other sensors - working across driver boundaries, synchronization, and calibration to produce reliable inputs for downstream algorithms\n\nBuild and optimize video and image processing pipelines end-to-end: capture, hardware-accelerated encode/decode, streaming, and storage\n\nContribute to tracking and state estimation algorithms, bridging raw sensor data and meaningful system outputs in close collaboration with ML and perception teams\n\nBuild and maintain CI pipelines, test harnesses, and reliability tooling - the simulators and replay systems that let the team move fast without breaking things in the field\n\nInstrument, profile and benchmark system performance - CPU/GPU utilization, memory pressure, network throughput and latency - and drive systematic improvements\n\nQualifications:\nBroad systems experience across the areas below, with demonstrable depth in at least one - whether that's networking, video/sensor pipelines, or low-level Linux systems work\n\nProduction Rust (preferred) or C++ in low-latency, embedded, or systems contexts - with real ownership of performance, reliability, and resource constraints\n\nDeep networking knowledge (UDP, TCP, QUIC) beyond the API level - packet loss, flow control, retransmission, and tuning for real-world conditions; strong Linux systems fundamentals including IPC, scheduling, and memory management\n\nHands-on hardware integration experience - cameras, IMUs, or other sensors - including driver interfaces, kernel boundaries, and video pipelines (capture, encode/decode, streaming via V4L2, GStreamer, FFmpeg, or similar)\n\nProficiency with concurrency and parallel programming - lock-free structures, async runtimes, thread management - with a track record of shipping correct, performant, concurrent code\n\nComfortable owning CI infrastructure, test harnesses, benchmarking pipelines, and observability tooling alongside feature work\n\nNice to Have\nExperience working alongside real-time, multimodal ML data ingestion systems - understanding the data quality, latency, and throughput requirements that make or break model performance\n\nHands-on experience with modern video codec implementations (H.264, H.265, AV1) across hardware platforms - encoder tuning, rate control, and platform-specific acceleration (V4L2, NVENC, etc.)\n\nRobotics, perception, or state estimation background - familiarity with sensor fusion, localization, tracking algorithms\n\nExperience writing Rust and Nix","description_format":"text","description_chars":4410,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Sensors & Transducers","IoT Platforms & Solutions"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T16:07:24Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T04:20:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 4","filings_12m":4,"filings_prev_12m":1,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":152500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":2,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.085,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":377,"expected_fill_days":21,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/specter-software-engineer-systems","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/specter-software-engineer-systems.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T15:47:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":15,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":63567},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=63567"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fspecter-software-engineer-systems"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fspecter-software-engineer-systems"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fspecter-software-engineer-systems"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/specter-software-engineer-systems\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fspecter-software-engineer-systems"}]}